Pre-Collegiates Students' Teaching Identities

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Pre-Collegiate Students' Teaching Identities
by
Teresa A. Galyean
Co-Chair: Dr. Susan Magliaro
Director of School of Education
Director of Center for Teacher Education
Co-Chair: Dr. Penny Burge
Professor, Educational Studies and Leadership
(Abstract)
A review of the research indicates that identifying self as a teacher can be a life-long, complex personal and social process. This researcher investigated 4 pre-collegiate students' construction of a teaching identity during their participation in an introduction to teaching course conducted in a rural high school located in a southeastern state. Two purposes framed this investigation, 1) to gain an in-depth understanding of the pre-collegiate students' past and present experiences related to teaching and the meanings the students make of these experiences, and 2) to examine these experiences as connected to construction of personal teaching identities. Using a life history methodology, data sources included 3 interviews, drawings of self as a teacher, journal writings, and personal experience writings. The findings are presented in 4 narratives one for each participant. Each narrative, represented by an exemplar quote, (i.e., Being There, Being a Kid, Right Heart, Being A Helper) illuminates the nature of the participants' teaching prototype, which emerged from past and present educational experiences. Results indicate that the participants possessed well-defined beliefs pertaining to caring teachers and to teaching as a profession, in addition, to commonly held cultural teaching beliefs. These beliefs guided their course experiences and self-assessment of a teaching identity. Although the identification to a teaching identity varied among the 4 participants, results indicate that 1 participant was actively constructing a storied teaching identity. A storied teaching identity involved a significant nuclear episode with a teacher that became the bound context for a teaching story. This type of high school level career studies course can assist in strengthening the recruitment pool of teacher education candidates and assist in testing a vocational teaching identity. Implications are offered for future research involving pre-collegiate students enrolled in an introduction to teaching course and investigation of storied teaching identities.